A couple of weeks ago my Piece of the Week was a movement from my Advent cantata, O Come Emmanuel – and this is another movement from it.
The fifteenth-century anonymous German text Es is ein Ros ensprungen has given rise to a great many musical settings. It is a paraphrase and development of the Advent text which begins ‘A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots; the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him…’ (Isaiah chapter 11) and probably the most well-known English translation is ‘There is no rose of such virtue, as is the rose that bare Jesu’ . Settings of this text range from an anonymous 15th century one to the version in Britten’s ‘Ceremony of Carols’ and a contemporary setting by Howard Skempton – and there are many more. But there are other translations, with musical settings, too.
There is a rose-tree uses a less well-known and rather beautiful translation by the American author Abbie Farwell Brown (1871-1927), which begins as follows:
There is a rose-tree blooming in winter’s frost and cold;
Its flower comes from Jesse, a sign of peace from old.
It is the Rose of Love…
It is often sung as a separate piece – but in O Come Emmanuel it appears as a movement between the lively ‘Come, thou long expected Jesus’ and the thoughtful ‘Earth grown old’ and it is a moment of calm for the unaccompanied choir singing a three-verse melody which gently climbs to a climax chord in each verse for ‘the rose of love’. I dedicated the setting to the memory of my teacher at the Royal College of Music, Herbert Howells (1892-1983), and, looking back, I think I must have had in my mind his anthem ‘Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks’ which has an unexpected B flat, harmonised as an E flat chord, within the key of E minor – I used a similar effect to depict the word ‘frost’.
The first and third verses have a very simple note-against-note texture, relying on the harmony and musical shaping of the words for interest, but for the first part of the second verse the melody switches to the tenors and basses, with wordless vocalising above. Finally the third verse is extended to encompass the additional words ‘The future of the world’ set in a chorale-like manner.
It is available as a digital offprint here, and the complete O Come Emmanuel is available here.
Here’s a recording of this movement (with scrolling score) by the Selwyn College Chapel Choir (director Sarah MacDonald) for whom it was written. A google search on YouTube will reveal some other performances, too.
Next week I hope to produce a short Christmas newsletter.